Every Alabama public high and middle school now has defibrillators

View full sizeCris Brown, left, and Dr. Yung Lau this week accomplished their goal of placing an automatic defibrillator in every Alabama public high school, middle school and junior high that lacked one. Now theyâll focus on getting second units in bigger schools and on making sure the devices are maintained and staff is trained to use them. (The Birmingham News/Mark Almond)

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- After three years of fundraising and effort, the nonprofit Alabama LifeStart has succeeded in placing an automated defibrillator in every public high school, middle school and junior high in the state that lacked one, officials said this week.

Now the work begins, said the manager and doctor behind the effort.

The last of 120 schools to get one of the devices from the organization, Carver Magnet School in Dothan, took delivery of its defibrillator Wednesday, said Dr. Yung Lau, a professor and associate director of the Alabama Congenital Heart Disease Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Now Alabama LifeStart, a joint venture of UAB and Children's of Alabama, will shift its focus to getting a second unit for bigger schools and to making sure schools maintain the devices and keep staff trained to use them. Teachers, coaches and administrators must be re-certified through American Heart Association or American Red Cross training every two years, and the devices periodically require new batteries and replacement parts.

The automated external defibrillators deliver an electric shock to restore normal heart rhythm, and have been credited with saving the lives of four children and an undetermined number of adults in metro Birmingham in recent years. Three of those children were saved within six months in 2004 and 2005, converting Lau from a skeptic into a believer.

"All of a sudden it became obvious this was a life-saving thing," Lau said. "I'm convinced every one of those kids would have died" if AEDs hadn't been present in their schools.

The effort to get AEDs in schools in Alabama can be traced back to 2000, when Britain's Lord Piers Wedgwood was visiting Birmingham on behalf of his family's famed china business. After surviving a heart attack while in Birmingham, Wedgwood teamed up with friend Frank Bromberg III of Bromberg's jewelry to get hundreds of the devices placed in schools and public places across the Southeast.

In 2007, Alabama LifeStart conducted a survey that found many Alabama schools -- particularly in the impoverished Black Belt -- still didn't have the devices, and set out to close the gap.

With the help of the Lord Wedgwood Charity and corporate donors including Alabama Power Co. and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama, the organization raised enough money to cover the expense of the machines, which can cost between $1,000 and $3,000 each.

Cris Brown, who helps manage the program, said the organization hopes to enlist the assistance of parents and parent-teacher associations to make sure school officials maintain the devices and get re-certified to use them. Nationally, that's been a problem.

A 2005 study published by the Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine and a small study in Iowa found that schools often don't budget money to maintain the devices, and they fall into disrepair.

Parent associations in some schools have taken it upon themselves to be responsible for maintenance, and more will be urged to do the same, Brown said.

"It's such an easy thing to help remedy," Brown said.

The devices themselves, about the size of a small tablet computer, are easy to use, said Brown and Barbara Mostella, a UAB nurse who works with the program. Wired pads run from the device to the patient's chest and deliver the shock. The machine's computer diagnoses the problem and walks the user through the necessary steps.

"It talks to you," Brown said. "If you don't do the step it tells you to, it will repeat it until you do."

Alabama LifeStart is an affiliate of Project ADAM, founded at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin in 1999 after a series of deaths of student athletes.